Fecal Sludge Management: A smelly but fruitful business!

Today, 2.1 billion people in urban areas use non-sewered (or on-site) sanitation facilities. While much of the work in rural areas is focused on creating and sustaining open defecation free communities and generating demand for communities to construct toilets, the downstream activities of collecting and transporting fecal sludge present a unique challenge for urban residents. These services are mostly provided by private operators, and are generally uncontrolled and unregulated. The inadequate disposal of fecal sludge in the environment represents a direct threat to public health and negates the positive outcomes from behavioral change and improvements in sanitation access.

The urban population in developing countries, and in particular the poor, rely on fecal sludge collection and transportation services that are often not affordable. In addition, pit emptying is often done by hand, exposing the operators to serious health risks (see figure below). Often mechanical emptiers, using vacuum trucks, charge excessive fees to customers but do not pay taxes or comply with laws and standards due to a general lack of regulation for these services. This makes it a highly profitable business. For example an emptying service provider in Abuja makes US$ 15,000 per month.

Manual emptier in Senegal, also called Baay Pelles

To better understand the markets for these services, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded a study [1] that analyzes the fecal sludge management sector and its operating models in 30 cities in Asia and Africa. The cities studied had populations of 100,000 – 5 million.

The study surveyed 13,000 households and 150 fecal sludge emptying and transportation service providers. The population of the 30 cities selected represents over 67 million people or 12 million households, providing a relatively comprehensive picture of urban sanitation services across ten countries.

The baseline information and findings of the study will be shared with sector stakeholders to help build sustainable service provision for sanitation and formulate policy recommendations to improve business sustainability.

The recommendations of the study addressed various issues faced by service providers in FSM and in particular how to improve profitability by proposing a more adequate business model, as well as measures to create an enabling environment for these services (as illustrated in the chart below).

Proposed business model

The study also recommends the use of innovative solutions such as using geo tubes to create sludge transfer stations, which will reduce costs and increase the number of trips per day (which creates more profit for the operators and serves additional households). Geo tubes are containers made of permeable textiles used for dewatering sludge and sediment (see picture below). This solution has worked well in Malaysia, where the utility placed geo tubes in several strategic locations, resulting in a reduction of overall operations expenses by 37% and an increase of 35% in revenues.

Geo tubes in Malaysia

The study also focused on other issues relating to the sanitation value chain, particularly the safe disposal and treatment of sludge. Wastewater treatment plants – if they exist – are in many cases inadequate for the size of the cities they serve, and fecal sludge treatment sites are scarce or inexistent. Safe re-use of human waste is also a sector that needs to be further developed, as it offers opportunities to create income-generating activities and produce bio energy.

Hi Eng. Mughal I very well agree with your observations. Tahunganh needs some assistance in substance. As far as I know, Dr. Barbara Senkwe PhD of USAID SUWASA has done such work in the South Sudan but I doubt if she is still available on her email address at bsenkwe@ard-suwasa.org as the project is winding up soon. We featured her article ‘An Emerging Fecal […]

Hi Virginia Thanks for your important work you are doing in Madagascar. The country was in focus in March this year as its president Mr. Hery Rajaonarimampianina became the first Chief of State in the world to sign a pledge in public to end open defecation. We presented a short mention of this in our Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene May-June 2015 editi […]

Hi Kris Thank you very much for your thoughts. We agree with your concerns. That's why we have given so much importance to develop the protocol so easy and cost effective which can potentially be done at the local level. However, phage therapy has been successful to treat diarrhoeal infection in human gut which is as complex as waste water system. Moreo […]

I request the users of this forum, especially the senior friends, to kindly help Hung, by responding to his survey. The survey is a bit long. He said he needs large data and a wider response. I know, PhD work requires lot of work. Like me, he is also from AIT, so, my request for his survey F H Mughal

Dear forum members, This study was done as a part of master thesis in my master degree program. Although it does have lot of initiatives to carry on this research. This business runs informally in the Bangalore city (and also might be in other cities of India), so it was a challenging task to get business details from the entrepreneurs. However, the research […]

Integration of Nutrition and WaSH programmes was the key topic discussed at the multi sectorial panel seminar hosted by Irish Aid, the IFGH and the Development Studies Association of Ireland on the 19th May.

Sustainability is without doubt one of the most burning subject matters that subsumes many of the issues that we are seeing in CLTS and wider WASH practice.On Wednesday 24th June, from 14.00-15.30 BST (convert to your time zone here), the CLTS Knowledge Hub will offer a webinar on the subject.

Over 50 female leaders from around the world recently published a declaration calling for the end of poor sanitation and hygiene in the developing world. Among those leaders are the first ladies of Madagascar and Malawi, both of whom announced the declaration in Washington, D.C.